Day 3, Ahujas

Woke up a little late again today (about 10:30am – better than when I woke up at noon yesterday?) which soured plans to see the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, but I did manage to stuff a chocolate croissant into my mouth within the first few minutes of waking, so I suppose you could call that a feat. Life at the Ahuja’s is blissful and…English? The food is delicious and the company is good, both of which often lead to a death of ambition for going out but make staying in all the more pleasant. Today, no such override was in place. Ketan and I visited the Inns of Court, saw justices in their daily garb, and reminisced on white gloves and Assizes. After a brief stroll around Temple Church and the Knight’s of Templar, we carried on to Regent’s Park where we threw a frisbee back and forth across well-kempt grass and tried to sneak through the bordering bushes to get into an event where someone must have been cooking bratwurst. Turns out they put up an extra two fences to stop people from doing exactly what we were trying to do. Typical. Instead we went to the children’s playground on the north end of the park and swung in unison to reclaim our childhood. We were so distracted in sucking the past into the present that we failed to remember the future. In other words, we were late for our 7:00pm Dinner Party Engagement. The Dinner Party was England at its finest – a whole baked hog, pork and baked pig-skin sandwiches, steak-and-onion potato chips, and trimmed-on-top-shaggy-on-bottom dogs. Apparently many of the neighborhoods on the South Side are beautiful victorian apartment buildings surrounding beautiful inner garden courts. The whole idea of back fences doesn’t really exist (except perhaps for the small 8×8 ft. garden plots behind each apartment) which means that the gardens can end up being about 30 ft x 700 ft (about the length of 1.5-2 football fields?). The whole concept is beautifully interdependent, which seems a little unique for Brits, but I suppose assumptions were made unmade.